the name "fedora"

[seth vidal]

On Sat, 2005-07-02 at 23:38 +0200, Thilo Pfennig wrote:
> Am Samstag, den 02.07.2005, 11:09 -0400 schrieb seth vidal:
> 
> 
> > In english, which is the language of the majority of the mailing lists
> > and communication about the distribution there is no such thing as
> > gender being applied to words. So how about we keep it that way.
> 
> Ah, but you do have names for women and for men? I did not say that
> Fedora is feminin in english. I just ment, that from some of the roots
> of the word one could deduce such thing.

>  And I don't think we should concentrate on the english language. 

We already do focus on the english language. Sure there are translation
projects and i18n/l10n efforts but all development is in english. The
company that pays for fedora does all their interactions in english. The
'common' language for linux, as said, repeatedly, by Linus Torvalds is
english.

So yah, we do focus on english, let's not be silly.

> Linux is wide spread. Soon there might be billions of chinese that use 
> english. It might ebven be helpful to be careful that a name does not sound similar to something stupid or
> offending in another language. I guess Red Hat might have investigated a
> bit before choosing the name "Fedora"? 

That's a rathole of marketing and silliness that's not worth worrying
with anymore. 

The name of the project is fedora. The name is staying and we make do
with what we have. If someone in red hat's hierarchy wants to rename the
project and distribution then more power to them, but none of us have
that kind of authority.

> No, it is important to make involvment and contribution easier, but that
> does not make a distribution more accessible. Attractiveness comes from
> good software and good usability. But I aggree that both things are
> important and can looked at seperated.

Then the things necessary to make the distro more accessible aren't to
be discussed on this list. Discuss them on fedora-desktop-list and
fedora-devel-list.

-sv